the death of the heroine be somewhat frigid and artificial, the last days of the hero strike the only note of what we now call Byronism,[19] between the Elizabethans and Byron himself.  And yet a little story of a ship-wrecked sailor, with not a tenth part of the style nor a thousandth part of the wisdom, exploring none of the arcana of humanity and deprived of the perennial interest of love, goes on from edition to edition, ever young, while Clarissa lies upon the shelves unread.  A friend of mine, a Welsh blacksmith, was twenty-five years old and could neither read nor write, when he heard a chapter of Robinson read aloud in a farm kitchen.  Up to that moment he had sat content, huddled in his ignorance, but he left that farm another man.  There were day-dreams, it appeared, divine day-dreams, written and printed and bound, and to be bought for money and enjoyed at pleasure.  Down he sat that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned to borrow the book.  It had been lost, nor could he find another copy but one that was in English.  Down he sat once more, learned English, and at length, and with entire delight, read Robinson.  It is like the story of a love-chase.  If he had heard a letter from Clarissa, would he have been fired with the same chivalrous ardour?  I wonder.  Yet Clarissa has every quality that can be shown in prose, one alone excepted—­pictorial or picture-making romance.  While Robinson depends, for the most part and with the overwhelming majority of its readers, on the charm of circumstance.

In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and the pictorial, the moral and romantic interest, rise and fall together by a common and organic law.  Situation is animated with passion, passion clothed upon with situation.  Neither exists for itself, but each inheres indissolubly with the other.  This is high art; and not only the highest art possible in words, but the highest art of all, since it combines the greatest mass and diversity of the elements of truth and pleasure.  Such are epics, and the few prose tales that have the epic weight.  But as from a school of works, aping the creative, incident and romance are ruthlessly discarded, so may character and drama be omitted or subordinated to romance.  There is one book, for example, more generally loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in childhood, and still delights in age—­I mean the Arabian Nights—­where you shall look in vain for moral or for intellectual interest.  No human face or voice greets us among that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggarmen.  Adventure, on the most naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment and is found enough.  Dumas approaches perhaps nearest of any modern to these Arabian authors in the purely material charm of some of his romances.  The early part of Monte Cristo, down to the finding of the treasure, is a piece of perfect story-telling; the man never breathed who shared these moving incidents